ALBUM REVIEW: Sleep Token – ‘Even In Arcadia’

What is actually going on? There wasn’t a chance that the rise in capital would shrink this soon, but why are we here already? No, actually—why are we here at all? In the US, all three of Even In Arcadia’s pre-release singles charted on the Hot 100. As in, the actual mainstream charts, where Sabrina Carpenter and Morgan Wallen live. Here in the UK, we’ve apparently seen fit to award our homegrown heroes (?) with top 40 debuts for the three, one being in the top 10.

It’s still bizarre that Sleep Token seemingly willed their enormity into existence and everyone just went along with it. What’s even more baffling is how there’s yet to be an adequate reason for it. Any intrigue present at the start is long gone, with the remains smothered and atomised by the hour-long block of stodge that was Take Me Back To Eden. Now, we’re at a point where even the briefest conversational point about Sleep Token feels like a chore. They’re overexposed and exhausting to truffle out through perennial discourse, and flanked by another freakishly obsessed gaggle of fans (like we needed another one of those). And all the while, there’s nothing interesting about them. Okay, they’re anonymous and bog themselves down with lore—so what? None of that makes the music any better.

Perhaps, then, any incredulity at seeing Sleep Token worm their way into mainstream spaces is a little misguided. It’s not like anyone else in metal is as adapted for it as they are, willing to douse themselves in genre-juice for the purpose of seeming ‘enlightened’ in how their stylistic fusions work, when in reality, they aren’t doing anything new with the parts they’re co-opting. But if you’re a pop fan using this as your gateway into something harder (or an alt fan that prefers the fashion of that tag to what it actually represents), Sleep Token probably do seem like this singular, one-of-a-kind entity. From that angle, the band can’t be blamed for where they’ve ended up.

Who can be are the hypesters and outlets willing to bend over backwards at any mention of their name, lauding every breath taken as some evolution of the artform. It’s honestly just tiring to watch Sleep Token be perpetually glazed by sources who should know better. As a result, Sleep Token have boomeranged round from a potentially cool alt-crossover act to the epitome of corporate rock not that far beneath Linkin Park. ‘Organic’ groundswell doesn’t look like this, nor does it feel like Even In Arcadia with how many hands are blatantly in the pot. You can practically hear the barks of besuited overlords ringing all the way through, mandating a mainstream feel without dropping a vestige of the initial labyrinthine, heavier appeal, while imploring the added genre beats are highlighted for good measure. In the lineage of Sleep Token releases, this mightn’t have its ‘built by committee’ vibes scream out, but they’re unquestionably, chronically there.

If you’re a metal fan—as in, someone who listens to metal on a regular basis, with even some variety to your range if you’re feeling spicy—it’s totally inconceivable that Sleep Token could be your ‘favourite band’. It’s everything you’d want a metal album not to be—cold and clinical, in part out of a dormant tech-metal background, but mostly due to a complete lack of human impulse or intensity. There’s an added dearth of meaningful progression to contend with, as it groans and gallumphs from one set piece to the next. And in true Sleep Token fashion, there’s not a lick of urgency or fluidity to this. You’d hope that’d be a granted concession if they insist on making hour-long albums, instead of allowing Even In Arcadia to feel every one of its laborious minutes.

If anything, it’s the use of metal on this album that finds Sleep Token’s creative strides at their most lacking. Rare is it that a transition to real heaviness won’t feel shockingly graceless, like laying down an immobile slab of sound that further drags an album that’s already far from spry. Sure, it’s produced to sound like a complete monolith, and deepening the swerve to land in black-metal on Caramel and Infinite Baths is more daring than expected, but it’s hard to feel all that amazed by this. All it does is propagate Sleep Token’s thudding non-pace; it doesn’t justify it.

That’s not to say the rest of this instrumentation is off the hook, though. Somehow, an already ungratifying business model has only become more so on Even In Arcadia, as it’s hard to think of another recent album that grows more draining and tiresome with each subsequent spin. Pianos slosh about; simplistic trap beats rattle along with little import; a haze of production smothers it all and draws out anything colourful or textured; it’s nothing engaging. But what might be worse is how little a sense of direction factors into Even In Arcadia. For what’s presumably meant as a tentpole epic, a disproportionate amount of time is spent meandering into the ether. It doesn’t help that Sleep Token are fond of eschewing more traditional song structures, so as they stretch themselves even further on Look To Windward, Infinite Baths and the title track—y’know, the start, end and centrepiece of the album; nothing important—they feel borderline out of their depth.

That’s the kind of heretical claim that the Sleep Token conclave absolutely despise hearing, but what’s the argument against it? Even In Arcadia does frequently sound enormous, that’s true, but that’s it. It’s not enormous in a purposeful way, just one that’s big and empty. What’s more, when Sleep Token’s whole approach is founded on this clunk being bolted together, it’s almost impossible to see a way around it. When they do try like with Past Self, it’s easily the most insignificant that Even In Arcadia sounds—a dried-out trap beat paired with rinky-dink keys and a supreme lack of thrust. At least on Caramel’s one-off reggaeton foray, its airlessness comes with a moderately quicker step.

When that specific moment comes in, it’s actually a bit of a shock, not for what it is but for what it represents. See, for all the prostrations about Sleep Token being this genre-destroying force of musical nature, they’re never spreading out that widely outside of these isolated instances. So while they can definitely feel…well, token, they’re among the most enjoyable parts of Even In Arcadia, simply out of novelty. Gethsemane really comes out of left field with a math-rock portion that’s shockingly warm and organic; meanwhile, there’s a great patch of drumming at the end of Damocles that’s literally the only bit of the album where it’s noticeable. Other instances are much smaller—the saxophone at the end of Emergence and the weeping violin rounding the title track spring to mind—but they’re still here. They’re like flecks of gold in the mountainous pile of rocks that Arcadia clearly is.

Because remember—this is a Sleep Token album, a place where fun goes to die its miserable death. Expecting anything else is foolhardy thinking, because nothing this band do presents the idea of ‘fun’. It’s music to be engulfed by rather than enjoyed, whether you like that or not. And on that metric, the overwhelming self-seriousness is just another few barriers erected in the way of discovering significant appeal. Not that that’s anything new for Sleep Token; it’s just magnified by an especially punishing dourness that Even In Arcadia treats like a feature rather than a flaw. It’s practically spelled out on Damocles, verbatim uttering “I know these chords are boring” to justify its own ordeal. Even Vessel seems noticeably tamped back this time, where he no longer wails like a dying moose (although the title track gets close) and sticks to a more utilitarian form of glottal-singing and quasi-rapping.

And yet, for an album that’s so oddly written and stuck in the unwieldy dichotomy of itself, you’d think there might be a little self-awareness. Maybe not for the half of Sleep Token that’s lodged in its lore, which has always been pretentious nonsense but at least produces some excellent tidbits of imagery when leaning on the literate and the evocative. Dangerous has “I am caught in time / Like clockwork beneath the permafrost”, a beautiful piece of phrasing that seems like the ghost of a memory by the time Provider comes out with “You’re hitting my phone so hard, I found it breathing through a tube in the ICU”. On the same song is “the only bad baddie spinning eyes in the room”, which hits like a sledgehammer to the face of any notion of grander mythology carrying weight. The entire album is like that, a constant combo of drain-circling references to religion and classic iconography, and pop-trap anachronisms that an individual with a voice and stoic demeanour like Vessel’s should not be left to sell. There isn’t anything wrong at all with scaling down to personal stakes—see Caramel, which takes the absolutely valid stance of being sick to the back teeth of Sleep Token fans—but knowing what you’re doing with them helps, too.

For a band that so many have come to swear by over the last couple of years, it really seems like flubbing the basics isn’t uncommon for Sleep Token. Maybe they’ve prematurely adopted a ‘too big to fail’ mindset, which will likely only get worse off the back of their newfound charting run. Or maybe they’re just…not as great as everyone wants to believe? When Sleep Token headline Download next month, chances are it won’t feel like the event that it’s supposed to, because of what’s on an album like Even In Arcadia. The music that Sleep Token are making doesn’t feel equipped for that, in magnitude or longevity. Buzzy names come and go, but even with the infallible front that Sleep Token currently have, hearing what they’re bringing to the top table sparks less enthusiasm than ever.

For fans of: Bring Me The Horizon, Post Malone, Nothing More

‘Even In Arcadia’ by Sleep Token is out now on RCA Records.

Words by Luke Nuttall